Author: Nathan J. Eisner (Bard High School Early College Bronx)
The gap in wealth between White and Black Americans after the abolition of slavery has been a persistent and defining element of American life. The decades following Emancipation brought the fastest convergence in racial wealth in American history, but also fierce resistance from the institutions that emerged in the post-Reconstruction South. Discriminatory general stores were one such barrier to Black economic mobility. Using a novel data set of rural route locations and the plausibly quasi-random roll-out of rural postal routes, this article studies how Rural Free Delivery, and the mail-order catalog industry it enabled, connected Black Americans in the rural South to a national marketplace beyond the discriminatory Southern country store. The findings provide the first evidence that rural routes increased fertilizer expenditures in counties with higher shares of Black farmers, along with long-run gains in literacy for Black children exposed to rural routes.
The Country Store, the Catalog, and Anonymous Consumption
For Black farmers in the Jim Crow South, the country store was not just a place to shop. It was frequently the only option for acquiring both general consumption goods and farm equipment, and it acted as a form of social control. Store owners overcharged Black consumers for credit, sold them lower-grade goods, and limited their access to productivity-enhancing goods such as fertilizer. Preventing Black farmers from investing in their own productivity, these stores served to keep Black farmers and laborers indebted to White landowners and trapped in the system of sharecropping and tenant farming. In the Cotton South, only 21.9 percent of Black-operated farms purchased fertilizer, compared to 33.5 percent of White-operated farms, despite Black-operated farms having a greater need for it.
The advent of Rural Free Delivery at the end of the nineteenth century represented a sea change in the way rural Americans purchased goods and interacted with the country at large. Mail-order giants like Sears, Roebuck and Co. and Montgomery Ward took advantage of a new market of consumers able to receive catalogs directly to their homes, selling not only general merchandise but farm equipment and fertilizers. For Black farmers, this was the first major disruption to the hegemony of the Southern general store. The catalog offered a rare means to participate in the marketplace as equals, with an unprecedented degree of anonymity, outside of the discrimination and debt-peonage encouraged by the Southern store.
If Rural Free Delivery gave Black farmers access to fairer markets, fertilizer expenditures should rise most where Black farmers were most numerous. And if Black farmers were becoming more productive, they should substitute toward lucrative crops like cotton that rely on heavy fertilizer investment, and away from crops like peanuts, where fertilizer does not provide the same benefits.
Rural Routes and Black Farmers in the Deep South
I construct a new data set from the Official Postal Guide and the Annual Reports of the Postmaster General documenting the expansion and intensity of Rural Free Delivery at the county level in the American Deep South. Figure 1 shows that the expansion occurred quickly and unevenly.
The earliest routes were intentionally unpredictable, placed where weather, road, and population conditions varied as much as possible. Later, the inundation of the Post Office with viable petitions, combined with no real guidance for route selection, left the final decisions to overworked postal agents. To test this, once I control for literacy and population, the only variables the Postal Service explicitly considered, routes are not strongly correlated with a county’s share of Black farms or its prior fertilizer spending. And because the Deep South was represented solely by Democrats, it received few to none of the patronage routes steered toward swing districts.
In Southern counties with above-median Rural Free Delivery exposure, every percentage point of Black-managed farms is associated with a 0.74% increase in fertilizer expenditures. With 44.23% of farms in the median Southern county managed by Black farmers, above-median exposure would be associated with a 32.73% increase in expenditures. Figure 5 makes the racial heterogeneity visible: for counties in the top quartile of Black farms, there is a sharp increase in expenditures where routes were plentiful. In the bottom quartile, counties with more routes simply follow the same secular trend as their less-served counterparts.
The results are driven by counties with a higher share of Black owner-operators. They also appear where railroad access was strong, suggesting that rural routes and railroads were complements in enabling Black farmers to access competitive fertilizer markets. On crop choice, treated Black counties show a significant movement toward lucrative but fertilizer-intensive cotton and away from peanuts. This suggests that Black farm counties leveraged greater access to fertilizer to shift to a more productive equilibrium.
Using the IPUMS Linked Census Data, I find that one additional rural route during school-age years improved literacy in 1930 by 1.59 percentage points more for Black than for White Southerners. The effect is driven by children young enough to fully benefit from primary and secondary education, and potentially too young to have substituted into labor-intensive cotton production.
Beyond Information: Market Access and Black Mobility
Economic scholarship has recently begun to recognize the role of Rural Free Delivery in lowering information costs, with effects on manufacturing investment and voting behavior. This article extends that line of inquiry in two new directions: to agriculture, the primary driver of the Southern economy at the turn of the century, and to the disparate racial impact of postal connectivity.
The beneficial role of the program for Black farmers was likely unintentional, boosted by the confluent rise of a zealous national mail-order industry based outside the social milieu of the South. Just as e-commerce today disproportionately benefits those disadvantaged in face-to-face negotiation, the mail-order catalog a century earlier offered Black Americans a way around discrimination, with lasting consequences for their productivity, their wealth, and their children’s education.